New York Law School's Visual Persuasion Project Launches Web Site

New Site Is First to Showcase ‘Best Practices’ in the Visual Litigation Services Field

Contact: Edith Sachs, Office of Public Affairs, 212.431.2187, esachs@nyls.edu

New York, January 5, 2006 --- In an era when most people receive news and entertainment from television and the Internet, lawyers are learning to adapt similar visual techniques for effective communication with judges, juries, and the public. New York Law School’s Visual Persuasion Project, founded and directed by Professor Richard K. Sherwin, explores the increasing role played by visual and multimedia tools in contemporary legal practice. Professor Sherwin and the Visual Persuasion Project have now announced the launch of the Project’s Web site, www.nyls.edu/visualpersuasion.

This site is the first, and to date the only, to showcase “best practices” in the visual litigation services field. The site features a broad range of visual products, from 2-D and 3-D animations to accident reenactments, day-in-the-life documentaries, settlement brochures, montages, and other innovative visual products.

Users of the Visual Persuasion Web site may choose among four main entry points:

• Visual Litigation and Litigation Service Providers, featuring best practices in visual persuasion inside the courtroom;
• Visual Legal Training, including new law teaching tools and methodologies in real and virtual classrooms;
• Law and Popular Culture, featuring new scholarly approaches to law and pop culture; and
• Recent Media Events, presenting law-related developments in the visual mass media.

“Each of these windows onto the practice, theory, and teaching of law in contemporary society informs the other,” said Professor Sherwin. “Traveling through one portal into another makes vivid the interpenetration of law and popular culture.”

The goal of the Visual Persuasion Project is to promote a better understanding of the practice, theory, and teaching of law in the current screen-dominated, pervasively visual, digital era. The Project was formed to study and advance the cultivation of critical visual intelligence, to inspire creative visualizations of evidence, case narratives, policy analysis, and legal argumentation, and to help lawyers, judges, law students, and the lay public integrate new visual tools into more traditional—that is, textual and verbal—approaches to legal analysis.

For more information about the Visual Persuasion Project, visit www.nyls.edu/visualpersuasion or contact Professor Richard Sherwin at rsherwin@nyls.edu.

About New York Law School

Founded in 1891, New York Law School is the second oldest independent law school in the United States. Drawing on its location near the centers of law, government, and finance in New York City, its faculty of noted and prolific scholars has built the school’s curricular strength in the areas of tax law, labor and employment law, civil and human rights law, media and information law, urban legal studies, international and comparative law, and interdisciplinary fields such as legal history and legal ethics. New York Law School has more than 11,000 graduates and enrolls some 1500 students in its full- and part-time J.D. program. It is one of only two law schools in the metropolitan area to offer the Master of Laws (LL.M.) in Taxation.